The female antihero and police power in FX’s Justified

ABSTRACT

The male antihero in the police procedural is marked by a fundamental conflict. On the one hand, his hypermasculine behavior signals that he is an independent actor with no allegiance to the state for which he works. On the other hand, his actions usually work to shore up the power of the state, which relies on his hypermasculine displays of independence to get the job done. Through this sleight of hand, audiences are encouraged to embrace the cop and loathe the system, not recognizing the fundamental complicity of the two. We argue that this formula is significantly interrupted in Season Two of Justified, when audiences are introduced to a female antihero—Mags Bennett—as powerful and trigger-happy as its main protagonist—Raylan Givens. As Mags emerges as the primary unlawful force of the show, Raylan increasingly aligns himself with the federal forces he was more at odds with in Season One. Mags strips Raylan of his antihero status, exposing him as a working stiff for the feds. The season ends with Mags’s death, but not before it presents audiences with a glimpse of an alternative order—one in which toxic masculinity gives way to matriarchal ascendance and extra-legal violence is revealed as the modus operandi of the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Police drama
• television
• female antihero
• Justified
• class

Notes

1. See Michael Albrecht (2016).

2. On the complicity of the police drama with forms of masculine domination, see Rebecca Feasy (2008). For more on the idealization of the male “mythical beat cop” see Christopher P. Wilson (2000).

3. For more on this phenomenon, see Ann Caldwell and Samuel A. Chambers (2007) and Nicholas Ray (2012).

4. See, for example, Barry Langford (2003) and Lee Clark Mitchell (1996).

5. For a reading of Raylan’s rouge tactics in relation to aggressive policing in the United States, see John R. Fitzpatrick (2015).

6. The police genre conventionally obscures potential abuses of state power by exciting viewers’ fear of social disorder and then assuaging this fear through the promise of justice, order, and narrative closure; see Susanna Lee (2004) and Yvonne Tasker (2012).

7. See Mittell (2015, 149–150) on the relative lack of female antiheroes.

8. For more on the politics of coal mining in Justified, see Joanna Crosby (2015) and Clint Jones (2015).

9. See John Sumser (1996) on the genre’s gradual replacement of the action-oriented cop with the middle-class bureaucrat. See Arntfield (2011) on the ways that the genre’s shifting approach to technology affects its portrayal of police officers as workers.

10. For an alternative reading of the “sorry alignment between government and those who would exploit the families of Harlan County,” see Peter S. Fosl (2015, 188).

11. On the brutalities enacted within families in Justified, see Julia Mason (2015) and Paul Zinder (2015).